Information as the source of life; Royal society (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, February 17, 2016, 20:25 (2983 days ago) @ dhw

Excerpts from two papers: - http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/is-the-royal-society-finally-catching... - "The supporters of the information paradigm insist that information is a real and fundamental component of the living world, but have not been able toprove this point. As a result, the chemical view has not been abandoned and the two paradigms both coexist today. Here, it is shown that a solution to the ontological problem of information does exist. It comes from the idea that life is artefact-making, that genes and proteins are molecular artefacts manufactured by molecular machines and that artefacts necessarily require sequences and coding rules in addition to the quantities of physics and chemistry. More precisely, it is shown that the production of artefacts requires new observables that are referred to as nominable entities because they can be described only by naming their components in their natural order. From an ontological point of view, in conclusion, information is a nominable entity, a fundamental but not-computable observable." - *** - "The biologically relevant concept of information has to do with ‘meaning', i.e. encoding various biological functions with various degree of evolutionary conservation. Apart from direct experimentation, the meaning, or biological information content, can be extracted and quantified from alignments of homologous nucleotide or amino acid sequences but generally not from a single sequence, using appropriately modified information theoretical formulae. For short, information encoded in genomes is defined vertically but not horizontally. Informally but substantially, biological information density seems to be equivalent to ‘meaning' of genomic sequences that spans the entire range from sharply defined, universal meaning to effective meaninglessness. Large fractions of genomes, up to 90% in some plants, belong within the domain of fuzzy meaning. The sequences with fuzzy meaning can be recruited for various functions, with the meaning subsequently fixed, and also could perform generic functional roles that do not require sequence conservation. Biological meaning is continuously transferred between the genomes of selfish elements and hosts in the process of their coevolution. Thus, in order to adequately describe genome function and evolution, the concepts of information theory have to be adapted to incorporate the notion of meaning that is central to biology." - Comment: It is recognized that the genome contains information.